Google LLC has long been a technology leader, but the infrastructure it has built to support the majority of the world’s web searches isn’t translating as easily to the commercial enterprise market for cloud computing.

Boasting 90 percent of the world’s searches and generating $32 billion in U.S. search advertising revenue, Google’s consumer efforts reel in $30 billion more than its closest competitor. But despite the company’s market superiority, Google only holds 6 percent of a worldwide cloud infrastructure services market dominated by Amazon Web Services Inc., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. As virtualization needs scale with the development of new tech and competition between top information technology support players increases, how does Google plan to improve profitability and compete in the enterprise cloud space?

Looking to answer these and other questions, SiliconANGLE is at Google Cloud Next 2018, currently underway in San Francisco with exclusive commentary and interviews from its livestreaming video unit theCUBE. Live coverage will run from 10:30 a.m. PDT Tuesday, July 24, to 5:30 p.m. PDT Thursday, July 26. (* Disclosure below.)

As an increasing number of industries recognize the benefits of cloud, its market impact continues to scale up. Gartner Inc. predicts global cloud revenue will grow 21 percent in 2018 as its innovations afford new opportunities in the enterprise.

Cloud spending is expected to reach $160 billion worldwide this year, with discrete manufacturing, professional services, and banking industries making the largest investments in an effort to utilize public cloud in the integration of internet of things and big data analytics.

Despite Google’s presence as an industry leader across tech, and its plans to build out expansive cloud infrastructure, the web giant remains fourth in terms of cloud market share below Amazon, Microsoft and IBM. Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. reported 26 percent year-over-year first-quarter revenue growth, up four percentage points from the year before, though it is unclear what portion of that growth is driven by cloud revenue.

The majority of Google’s revenue comes from its advertising business, which totaled $26.642 billion in the first quarter. Sales for Google’s “other revenues,” including hardware sales and cloud, reached 4.3 billion in the first quarter, up $3.2 billion year-over-year.

“Google is the largest cloud company in the world [regarding] aggregate resources, has contributed an abundance of the open-source tech required to make cloud computing work, but its [business] model limits it in enterprise tech,” said Peter Burris, an analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE. “These other players know how to serve enterprise needs.”

Those enterprise needs include capitalizing on efficiencies, lowering expenses and leveraging use of the new technology available through virtualization while making cloud processes more secure. Google’s competitors hold the benefit of a head start in cloud services, building for enterprise early on where Google started later and targeted startups and small businesses. While leading cloud players are leveraging previously developed tech for customers, Burris said Google’s opportunity lies in its reputation as the source for these cloud tools.

“The starting play for Google is that they’re the biggest cloud player, they’ve put a lot of their [machine learning and artificial intelligence] tools in the cloud, and they’re the biggest provider of the open-source tech that’s made the cloud possible,” he said.

Despite its slow start, the company is making strong moves in cutting-edge cloud tech with offerings like TensorFlow for AI development, autonomous vehicle tech Waymo, and an internet of everything approach to potential real-time translation with Pixel Buds. But to perform as a contender against the new streamlined serverless compute offerings from AWS Lambda and Microsoft Azure, Burris maintained the most valuable investment for Google will be in Kubernetes.

“Google needs to commercialize Kubernetes,” Burris said. “This is crucial. They have to land certain contracts, be available by phone, quickly adjust practices and behaviors — [be] willing to do the things IBM’s been doing for 50 years, and AWS has begun doing the past three years.”

With a commercialized version of the currently open-sourced container orchestration system, Google could capitalize on the strong developer relationships and cloud ecosystem partners it has built through a history of delivering some of the best developer tech for building apps to scale.

For Google, the roadblock to gaining a foothold in the enterprise will likely stem from challenges in commercializing the products built for internal use and popularized through outsourcing. Will the company leverage the utility of these services toward creating specialized products for commercial distribution? All this and more will be explored at this year’s Google Cloud Next 2018.

Melody Meckfessel, vice president of engineering at Google Cloud, told SiliconANGLE she believes that some developers will want virtual machines and some will want to be close to the hardware with software services driving new abstractions and new kinds of automation.

“We look at the trend of containerization and Kubernetes and how that’s just taking off at a rate that I don’t think anyone expected, and then you start to see more and more abstractions to help manage the services around them,” she said. “We’re going to see new levels of abstractions evolving for developers and the manual sorts of tasks are becoming automated. You will see Google bringing insights of service operations right into development and up the stack as the abstractions evolve.”

Keynote speakers at Google Cloud Next 2018 include:

• Diane Greene, chief executive officer of Google Cloud
• Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of cloud infrastructure at Google Cloud
• Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist at Google Cloud
• Prabhakar Raghavan, vice president of apps at Google Cloud
• Dave Patterson, distinguished engineer at Google Cloud
• Jennifer Bennett, technical director, office of the chief technology officer at Google Cloud
• Brad Calder, vice president of cloud at Google Cloud
• Jennifer Lin, director of product management at Google Cloud
• Kip Compton, senior vice president at Cisco
• Susie Wee, vice president and chief technology officer at DevNet, Cisco
• Aparna Sinha, group product manager at Google Cloud
• Chen Goldberg, engineering director at Google Cloud
• Oren Teich, product management director at Google Cloud
• Mike Fisher, chief technology officer at Etsy
• Adam Seligman, vice president of developer relations at Google Cloud
• Sudhir Hasbe, director of product management at Google Cloud
• Melody Meckfessel, vice president of engineering at Google Cloud
• Indranil Chakraborty, product manager at Google Cloud
• Carol Carpenter, vice president of product marketing at Google Cloud

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch all of theCUBE interviews that will be taking place at Google Cloud Next, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s event on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE’s dedicated website and Ustream

All of theCUBE’s exclusive interviews from Google Cloud Next 2018 will be available on theCUBE’s dedicated website.

You can also watch all the interviews on the dedicated Ustream channel.

Watch on the SiliconANGLE YouTube channel

All of theCUBE interviews from Google Cloud Next, which runs from July 24-26, will also be loaded onto SiliconANGLE’s dedicated YouTube channel.

Cubecasts

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on both SoundCloud and iTunes, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE at Google Cloud Next 2018

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE include Google Cloud Next 2018 keynote speakers Jennifer Lin, Brad Calder, Kip Compton, Susie Wee, Aparna Sinha, Chen Goldberg, Oren Teich, Mike Fisher, Adam Seligman, Sudhir Hasbe, Melody Meckfessel, Indranil Chakraborty and Carol Carpenter.

Other guests include Jeff Moncrief, consulting systems engineer at Cisco; David Cope, senior director of market development at CloudCenter, Cisco; Dave Bartoletti, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester; Ruba Borno, vice president of Growth Initiatives and chief of staff to chief executive officer at Cisco; and John Thomas, director of product management, digital service operations cloud services at BMC.

TheCUBE will also speak with Karthik Rau, founder and chief executive officer at SignalFx; Rajesh Raman, chief architect at SignalFx; Tim Kelton, co-founder of Descartes Labs; Miriam Kakol-Hernandez, global customer leader at KPMG; Traci Gusher, principal, data & analytics at KPMG; Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager of cloud data services business unit at NetApp; Jeetu Patel, chief product officer at Box; and Dave Rensin, director, CRE and network capacity at Google Cloud.

Livestream of Google Cloud Next Keynotes

If you are unable to attend Google Cloud Next in San Francisco, you can still catch a livestream of the keynotes here. You can also watch spotlight sessions, interviews with experts, product demos and the latest news at that link.

(* Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: SiliconANGLE